SF Silent Film Festival to debut restored early Garbo drama

Greta Garbo as Elizabeth, the role that made her a star, in The Gösta Berling Saga. The 1924 film's new, 200-minute restoration by the Swedish Film Institute will screen at 7 p.m., Saturday, June 2, at the Castro Theatre when the San Francisco Silent Festival awards the 2018 San Francisco Silent Film Festival award to Jon Wengström and the Swedish Film Institute. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Photo: San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Garbo leads at Silent Film Festival: “Greta Garbo is luminous,” says San Francisco Silent Film Festival Artistic Director Anita Monga about the actress in “The Gösta Berling Saga,” the 1924 silent drama that made Garbo a star and will screen in a new 200-minute restoration during the May 30-June 3 festival.

The festival opens at the Castro Theatre with “The Man Who Laughs,” Paul Leni’s Expressionistic 1928 melodrama with a world premiere score by the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra.

But it is restorations that take the starring role at the event, with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival Award going to the Swedish Film Institute and Jon Wengström, curator of Archival Films, for their role in restoring and preserving “Gösta Berling.”

There will be 11 restored films in all, 10 making North American premieres. These include restorations that the festival has undertaken itself, including recently discovered 1906 earthquake footage that the organization is restoring in collaboration with the Niles Film Museum; Soviet drama “Fragment of an Empire” (1929); “Soft Shoes,” a 1925 actioner; and a courtroom drama, “The Other Woman’s Story” (1925).

Among the other restorations are closing-night film “Battling Butler,” a Buster Keaton comedy from 1926, said to be the stone-faced comedian’s favorite, and a long-thought-lost 1929 German version of “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” recently discovered in Poland with Czech intertitles.

“It’s so interesting to me,” says Monga. “In the silent era, films traveled to places internationally, and they never came back, (ending up), in many cases, behind the Iron Curtain. So that’s why there’s been a treasure trove of things found in the old Soviet bloc.”

Netflix in S.F. Film Festival spotlight: Netflix presents six films from directors as diverse as Hong Kong master John Woo and San Francisco documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, all scheduled to appear on the streaming service this year, at the 61st edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4-17.

Woo’s latest action-packed thriller, “Manhunt,” about an innocent man pursued for a crime he did not commit, leads three films that also include “Kodachrome,” starring Jason Sudeikis and Ed Harris as a father and son on a road trip, and Craig Johnson’s (“The Skeleton Twins”) “Alex Strangelove,” a coming-of-age comedy.

“End Game,” Epstein and Friedman’s short about San Francisco’s Zen Hospice Project, screens April 15 when the longtime filmmaking partners (“The Celluloid Closet,” “Howl”) are feted as the winners of the 2018 George Gund III Craft of Cinema Award.

Other Netflix docs screening at the festival are “Mercury 13,” about women trained as astronauts in the 1960s, and “Shirkers,” about what became of a film that novelist Sandi Tan made as a teenager in 1990s Singapore.

Film clips

•Musician Marc Capelle and his Red Room Orchestra will pay tribute to the late Stephen Parr and his archive of educational films, industrial docs and other rarities with an evening of music accompanying shorts from the collection at the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 9 at the Castro Theatre.

•Bay Area filmmaker Kara Herold is hosting a fundraiser to defray post-production costs of her debut feature, “39½,” a comedy starring Beth Lisick. The event on April 19 at Yerba Buena Center of the Arts features short films by female filmmakers, including Herold (“Bachelorette, 34,” 2009), Emily Hubley (“And/or,” 2012), and Oakland artist Kathleen Quillian (“Celestial Broadcast for Mrs. Jones,” 2006). www.ybca.org

•The late director Michelangelo Antonioni is in the spotlight on April 28 at the Castro Theatre for retrospective screenings of “L’Avventura” (1960), “L’Eclisse” (1962), “Red Desert” (1964), “Blow-Up” (1966), and “The Passenger” (1974.) Tickets $12-$70. www.cinemaitaliasf.com